Anglican Church of Canada re-count reverses marriage amendment vote

The Anglican Journal is reporting on an audit of last night’s General Synod action, which failed to pass an Amendment to the marriage Canon in the Anglican Church of Canada by a single vote. The audit concludes that confusion between a lay and a clergy vote caused the vote among the clergy to fail to meet the two-thirds majority needed to pass the Amendment [see Addendum below for a fuller account].

In fact, it seems, the Amendment has been passed by this General Synod.

This was the first reading of the Amendment, which needs to pass twice at General Synod in order to come into full effect. We will continue to follow this dramatic reversal of the story.

Addendum. As explained by General Secretary Michael Thompson in his statement of July 13, the error was a misclassification of his status as non-voting when in fact he was a voting member of synod:

We have since been provided, by Mr. Copeland, the list from which the electronic voting was coded, a list prepared by my office. That list described the General Secretary as “clergy, non-voting”. Data-on-the-spot simply coded the information that my office gave them. This error took place in my office, and I take responsibility for it. We were more than well-served by Data-on-the-spot. In fact, without Mr. Copeland’s prompt attention, I am not sure that we would have discovered the nature of the error and had a chance to understand and correct it.